Pyramid #3/120: Alternate GURPS V

[Kromm]

Keen new perspective
On a knotty conundrum
Can sever the snag

— A Phrygian

As its name makes clear, GURPS is by design generic and universal, meaning it offers tools to handle any theme, genre, or setting you throw at it: a set complete enough to tackle each challenge, although you might not always need everything in the toolbox. But play style is a tougher proposition – it's the product of the preferences and personalities of a specific group of gamers. No one system can promise that it will work for everybody. Fortunately, GURPS is friendly to those who want to customize the tools themselves.

Pyramid #3/120: Alternate GURPS V offers those who like to tinker some new perspectives on the core rules that might suit a particular gaming group or campaign better than the "plain vanilla" versions. Its helpful heresy consists of:

Opus Longa, Pugna Brevis

By Sean Punch

Almost all roleplaying games struggle with the balance between blazing-fast action scenes and tense technical or intellectual challenges. Each player has a different idea of what's fun, and this is reflected in the wide range of character archetypes found in most genres – especially ones that assume a heterogeneous adventuring team, like GURPS Action and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. The obvious resolution is to adjust the timeframes of one or both kinds of activities so everybody meets in middle. Here are some thoughts on how to do this, straight from the guy who designed GURPS Fourth Edition, Action, and Dungeon Fantasy.

Eidetic Memory: Describing Vehicles

By David L. Pulver

We know: "Where is GURPS Vehicle Design?" In the meantime, how about a compromise? From the author of GURPS Vehicles for GURPS Third Edition come these guidelines for converting real-world information into usable vehicle stat blocks. This isn't a design system, but it does provide all the essential details for those whose campaigns need detailed vehicle stats, but whose play style leans away from design mini-games and toward quickly assigning believable numbers to things that zoom across the countryside, soar through the air, and ply the seas.

The Fifth Attribute

By Christopher R. Rice

The GURPS library is full of things that could be seen as additional attributes, or at least as new secondary characteristics, but nearly all of them matter only to narrow subsets of characters; e.g., Energy Reserve is its own thing, but a thing nobody but power-users and spellcasters cares about. What's cool about Quintessence is that everybody has it. Sure, it's most important those with supernatural gifts . . . but even if that isn't your bag, you had best make sure you don't use it as a dump stat. Not unless you want to be known as "the one who always ends up cursed, mind-controlled, and drained by vampires." Especially psychic vampires, who get a whole new ability in the bargain.

Conditional Injury

By Douglas Cole

Since we're tinkering with fundamental attributes anyway . . . what about Hit Points? They're a great bookkeeping tool, to be sure. Yet they don't represent anything in the real world, so they can feel a little out of place in realistic campaigns. At the same time, they encourage picky bean-counting that doesn't suit the roll-and-shout nature of a lot of cinematic gaming. This alternative looks at what matters most in both cases: What your wounds actually mean, whether in medical terms or dramatic ones. We won't promise it'll make taking a beating more fun, but it might just pep up the game!

Editor Steven Marsh provides the customary intro and extro. His Random Thought Table takes a couple of sharp kicks at two more pillars of GURPS: character advancement and skills. If you do it right, nothing falls on your head.

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